One of the first things my dad had to do in preparation for the arrival of my first horse was to sell the 1967 Mustang that he thought I would choose over a horse on my sixteenth birthday. My dad was a mechanic by trade, just like his father. I learned from my aunt that dad was in the garage cleaning tools for his dad at a young age and naturally he followed in my grandfather’s footsteps. She told me that one time my dad lit an oily rag, put it inside a can, and put it on his pedal because that’s what exhaust fumes looked like as he pedaled down the road. She couldn’t remember a time when he wasn’t playing with something. He was not only creative, he was also an exceptional mechanic and a perfectionist. He had mechanically checked every inch of that Ford Mustang to make sure it was a solid vehicle for his daughter. That combined with some bodywork and a new paint job, and the Mustang was similar to any car in a dealership showroom. I must admit, it was a little sad to see him sitting by the side of the road with “for sale” signs in his windows. This was in 1971 and the Mustang hadn’t reached the classic status it has today, but even so, it didn’t stay there for long.
My horse over carriage decision meant more work for my father and the rest of my family. After moving from San Diego to Michigan, we ended up on a two-acre property with a house and three other buildings. There was a big store that my father used. He fixed cars for resale and worked on the vehicles of our family and friends. There was always a crowd of busy men on the weekends. Sometimes there were a dozen cars lined up from Dad’s store to the road. There was a small one car garage on the east side of our house that was not used for much of anything, and a long building behind the house that had been a greenhouse at one time.
He had collected magazine articles about horse stables. Everything from converted chicken coops to one made from stacked hay bales. In the end, my dad decided that the garage could be moved back to the country and become a stable for my first horse. It was a big Saturday project and all the regular weekend crew showed up to help. Dad had borrowed a flatbed truck from work to haul the building to the back. They braced and supported him with heavy beams and used hydraulic jacks to lift him high enough for him to sit on the platform. With its many layers of siding, the garage was much heavier than anyone had anticipated, and the beams were beginning to crack. A call to my uncle, who was the supervisor at a local steel mill, brought in metal I-beams to reinforce the beams. As they inched in front of the house, a pine tree interrupted their progress. A second guy left and came back with a chainsaw; problem solved. By the time the makeshift barn was placed in the field, the bottom was just barely lifting off the ground and the steel I-beams were bent.
Dad went to work on the garage to convert it into a single horse stable complete with feed and tack storage areas. He built a divider that gave me about a quarter of the barn space. He added a steward next to the horse and built a box to feed the grain. On the smaller side, he built a saddle rack that was parallel to the wall with just enough room to hold a saddle. It wasn’t convenient, but it saved space. Above it was a shelf with four large wooden pegs for hanging tacks, and below were two new trash cans to use for grain storage. They had left an old three-shelf cupboard at the front of the building, which would come in handy for more storage space for brushes and other necessities. My dad even built a gate that could be lifted between the storage area and the barn so he could guide my horse through the barn and out the side door. The next weekend Dad and his weekend crew dug a trench from Dad’s store to my barn to bring water and power to the building.
The next big undertaking happened during the following week. Someone knew of someone else who had an acacia grove at the back of his property. Neighbors, family and friends gathered in the woods to cut down the fence posts. They loaded them into my dad’s new truck and made multiple trips across muddy fields to get them home. Men and women joined the work crew and even my younger cousins got involved, removing the smallest limbs from freshly cut trees. Then came the digging of post holes. The facilities for my new horse were beginning to emerge from an empty field. Dad used three of the newly cut poles and made a mooring pole in front of the barn. He was smart enough not to hold the cross beam in place with simple nails. He had two long bolts with lock washers and nuts to make sure he would hold. An old claw-foot tub that had left our house during one of our early remodeling efforts was brought out into the country to be used as a water tank. We were finally ready to put up the electric fence.
We took a trip to the local farm office. I used to love that old farmhouse desk. It was a huge building located in the center of the city. There was a loading dock that you could back your truck into and an area that cut out in the ground for farmers to dump their grain. The building had wooden plank floors that creaked and echoed when you walked on them. There was always the sound of machinery running in the background. Old farmers wearing bib overalls worked there and could dump 100 pound bags of grain like they weighed nothing. And it smelled of earthy things: grain, hay, and sweet feed.
He went upstairs to an office to place his order and pay for his food. The office doubled as a small livestock supply store.
We chose coils of wire, ceramic insulators, special nails, and the pre-bent wires used to hold the fence on the insulators. The corner insulators looked like donuts and were held together with wire. A couple of years later, someone came out with plastic insulators that didn’t need the guy wires, and the ceramic variety became as obsolete as eight-track tapes. In the years that followed, I became an electric fence wizard. He could test it on a blade of grass to see if it worked, he could stretch it out using just a claw hammer, and he could immediately recognize the “zit-zit-zit” sound it made when something had grounded it.
While at the coop I splurged and bought a couple of brushes. My grandmother had given me a rusty old curry comb that had belonged to my grandfather. I looked at a metal hoof pick and put it in place. A few months earlier he had received a letter with “Congratulations! You are a winner in our Name the Quarter Horse contest.” She was so excited when I saw the envelope that he was shaking and holding back tears of joy. I was sorely disappointed when I opened it up to find my prize was a plastic helmet pick. Being both optimistic and stingy, I rallied after my initial disappointment at not winning the horse, putting away the hoof catcher knowing I would put it to good use at a later date. It turned out to be the only contest I ever won.
Now that we had everything set up and in place, it was time to find the horse. Surprisingly, we were sensible enough not to buy the first horse we saw. We didn’t even buy the second one. We take our time, call a few classified ads, and follow word of mouth recommendations. It was after looking at some ponies near Kalamazoo that their owner told us about a place he knew with horses for sale. He was across the interstate, about a mile from his farm. That’s where we found Cherokee.
They saddled him and I took a walk around the sand. Things were looking good. They opened the door and I went down the street and then came back. I could make it go where I wanted to go and stop when I wanted to stop without any difficulty. The price was right and included all the necessary tack for a new horse owner. Never mind the old adage about not buying a young horse for an inexperienced rider. Either we didn’t know or we had forgotten that paramount rule. As it turned out, it was not a problem. Cherokee was only three years old, but he was good-natured, not frivolous, and eager to please. My mother still comments on how lucky we were to end up with such a nice horse when we didn’t know what we were doing.
The second issue that we should have taken into account was its size. The big chestnut gelding was at least 16 hands tall. I, like everyone else in my family, was incredibly short. Throughout my school years, I was almost always the shortest kid in the class. My uncle later commented that he saw me as a peanut in an apple when I was riding my new horse. But thanks to my youth and flexibility, I had no problem riding him when he was saddled. It was the times when I was riding without a saddle that I couldn’t get on its back without finding something to use as a makeshift mounting block. I had seen my TV idol, Ranger Joe Riley on “Laredo,” frequently ride his buckskin horse without wearing stirrups. He simply threw his leg over the horse’s back and that was it. This is much easier to achieve for someone over six feet tall than for someone under five feet. Cherokee was a willing and quick learner. It didn’t take me long to train him to approach whatever he was standing on—trough, road guardrail, tree stumps, or large rocks—touching him on his opposite side.
The Saturday they gave birth to him was like a circus at my parents’ house. The usual team was there in my father’s garage, most of my relatives and everyone who had helped prepare for the big event. Of all the crowd that was there to witness my dream come true, only my aunt was smart enough to have a camera present. She took three photos with good old black and white film. I’m lucky she held on to these and gave them to me many years later.
I hadn’t slept much the night before I delivered my first horse. Dreaming of owning a horse had been such a big part of my teenage years that it was hard to understand what was really going to happen. The night after Cherokee arrived, I dragged a deck chair onto his lawn. There I spent the night in the summer heat, covered only with a sheet. I don’t know if I was afraid that I would somehow escape during the night or if I would wake up and find that it had all been an elaborate dream. When I woke up in the morning, I could hear the sounds of a horse trampling flies and chewing on grass. The big chestnut gelding was still in the field. I was the proud owner of my first horse and my life was about to change forever.
© 2012 Kristie Allison
